The Road to Hell
by tmelange
Summary: Nero learns that saving the world is only half the battle, while Dante learns he isn't immune to temptation. Salvation is the gentle touch of experience, the gusting winds of youth. Dante x Nero
1. Prelude: Dante's Inferno

**Title:** The Road to Hell  
**Author:** tmelange  
**Fandom:** Devil May Cry  
**Pairing:** Dante x Nero  
**Rating:** R

**Summary:** Nero learns that saving the world is only half the battle, while Dante learns he isn't immune to temptation. Salvation is the gentle touch of experience, the gusting winds of youth.

**Notes:** Based almost completely on DMC 4, since I haven't played any of the other installments in the series. I simply needed something to jumpstart my writing again, and since I liked the character designs of Dante and Nero so much, I thought this would be a good exercise. Hence, I'm not fully conversant in all aspects of this universe, but if I keep writing this story, I expect to take some time to get up to speed. Please forgive me in advance for any mistakes regarding characters or settings.

* * *

_**Prelude: Dante's Inferno**_

He reaches out a hand, and the motion takes a lifetime. Fingers brush soft skin at the base of the spine, the feeling electric, _illicit_.

_This isn't… _

His hand wanders, thumb along the indenture, the gentle curve of the bone, through the thin sheen of sweat and up to the baby-fine hair at the base of the neck, plays there, idly, in the nervous moisture, lightly tugging at the damp strands. The seduction is in the way the flesh trembles at the perfect play of fingers, like an instrument. The heightened response, the gorgeously tuned expanse of body laying next to his own, stretched out in his bed, waiting for him to do _anything_ that might come to mind. _Anything._ For him. _All for him._

Movement. A discontented shift, a sigh of displeasure because his hand has stopped its tickling, its gentle stroking. A head lifts from folded arms, and hair, incandescent, _white,_ in the moonlight spilling through the gaps in the window blinds, falls into blue eyes that are now staring at him quizzically.

_Nero._

Heat. It flares up from the pit of his stomach, overtakes him in an instant, as his eyes devour the beautiful face, the smooth chest, the slender lines from shoulder to hip. His hand moves, splays across the expanse between shoulder blades, applies pressure so that the body falls into his own, and he can bring lips to bear on neck, and nose, and cheekbones, and snow-white eyebrows, and the seashell of an ear, and, finally, to lips, as legs tangle, and the hard length of his cock nestles into the gap between thighs. He presses his hips into the body molded so sweetly against his own, moves in time to the pounding of his heart and the loud rush of blood in his ears.

He groans, his heavier frame shifting and pinning the other body to the bed, settling between legs, hard length against hard length, and still, it isn't enough. The body beneath him is wild, sweat-slicked and tense, a perfect match for him in every conceivable way. This body is…

_A gift. I made him for you, brother._

The salty taste of sweat, the way a small bit of it pools in the dip of a belly button. _Nero._ The way the body trembles as his tongue darts in, laps it up. _Nero._ Flutters out and around the circumference, and down across the flat expanse of lower stomach, right where the line of fine hair starts and leads lower. He blows a name into sensitive skin, the only name that matters. _Nero._ Worships him, _adores him,_ as he moves further down—

_This…is…a…mistake._

_Look at him. He's begging for you, brother._

_A mistake. _

Laughter. Not his own. Not Nero. It distracts him from the beautiful body writhing so desperately under his hands. He stills, moves up Nero's body and soothes him with a kiss and a hand that caresses a cheek. This is wrong. _There is something wrong—_

He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath that is filled with the intoxicating scent of the young man in his bed and their aborted activities—

_You should have claimed him, Dante. It was a mistake to leave him alone and unprotected._

**Vergil.**

Dante's breath hitched in his chest, and his eyes snapped open. It took him a full ten seconds to realize that he was in bed in his room in the apartment above _Devil May Cry._ Alone. Sunlight peaked through the blinds, but only faintly, and it was obviously way too early to be awake. Nevertheless, he threw back the covers, grimacing at the sticky mess in his boxers, and the cold clamminess of his skin.

He maneuvered to sit on the edge of the mattress. A hand through his hair provided a bit of calm, but his heart was racing, his stomach churning. He could still feel the ghost of every imagined caress, the way his fingertips, his lips, felt against skin. This was the fourth crazy dream this week, all featuring the kid—Nero. Which made little sense, since he hardly knew the young knight at all beyond having spent some time with him saving the world. The kid was a good ten years his junior, besides, and he'd never previously had a penchant for robbing cradles. So he was either hitting a mid-life crisis at the tender age of twenty-nine, projecting some sort of guilt onto the kid because he let him keep Vergil's sword, or there was going to be trouble.

Dante yawned, then got to his feet and stretched. There was nothing to be done about any of it this early in the morning. Meanwhile, what he really needed was a shower. If his dreams still echoed oddly in his head—so what? The hot water would put things to right. The kid was more than capable of taking care of himself. Until something _happened, _there was really no sense worrying…

_You should have claimed him, Dante. It was a mistake to leave him alone and unprotected._

_He's not nearly as strong as you._


	2. Mission One: Into the City of Woe

**_Mission One: Into the City of Woe_**

**I.**

_Fortuna City might never recover,_ a low voice whispered in the back of his head, as his left fist connected with a face, knocking a certain opportunistic thug backwards and into the garbage cans against the wall of the dark alley. _It's up to you, Nero. You're responsible. You…YOU. You're the only one who can save them…save her…_

_Save her._

The voice in his head sounded remarkably like Credo—only Credo was gone, and everything he had claimed to believe in, destroyed. In the weeks that had passed since Nero had saved the world, his inner musings had taken on the tone of Credo's moralistic drawl, the character of the mentor who had been the first to put a sword in his hand, the first to teach him what to do with it and why, the paragon he had at one time tried so hard to emulate, and, in the end, could never please, despite his every attempt.

Credo. The…_brother_…who had betrayed him, hunted him, tried to kill him, all on the say-so of some crazy, power-hungry old man. Even now, Nero could feel the heat of his disapproving glare, the emasculating sear of his disappointment. Never pious enough. Never good enough. Never good enough for—

**Kyrie.**

Again, his fist met face, and the pounding, the crunch of bone that said the guy's nose would never be the same again, appeased the desperate need to _do_ something; to put everything back in its proper place, to rewind and reclaim, and somehow make it alright again. Things were supposed to go back to normal after you saved the world.

_I wasn't the one who failed. This isn't my __**fault.**_

His right arm was back in the sling, while his left administered the beating. This one he had caught looting, and the one he had already beaten unconscious had been setting abandoned cars on fire. These two were the type of scavenger filth that had quickly seeped back into the city after the devastation and ruin wrought by the summoning of their so-called _savior._ Fortuna, though small in size, had always been the trendy cultural center of the surrounding group of cities that lay within fifty miles of one another. Normal people, especially those living within the shadow of the cathedral, had yet to figure out a way recoup their losses, and were slowly trickling back to apartment buildings and townhouses that were only partially standing.

So many lives wrecked. A life. _His life._ Everything he had ever known, the safe place he had called home for thirteen years, ever since he was pulled from the orphanage by the Order recruiter at age six. Perhaps it had only ever been a façade anyway, a thin veneer of piety over a holy farce.

But it was all he had.

_Now he had nothing._

"Come on!" he yelled at the guy cowering in the shadows. _"Come on!"_

_**My fault.** _He kicked the guy again._ My fault that I wasn't strong enough. _And again._ My fault that I let them take her._

Then it came to him. Threaded through the nighttime black of a moonless sky, on a gust of wind that whipped discarded litter into a frenzy and presaged a thunderstorm—a note. High and clear and perfect.

_**Kyrie.**_

For a moment, he froze. There was blood on his hand. He stared at it, at a loss, while the thug who was enjoying this inexplicable reprieve stared up at him with wide, wounded eyes. Nero turned and started running.

As he ran, it started to rain.

Her song was as beautiful as it had always been, an aerial benediction, a blessing too pure, too innocent for the ordinary sinner. It pulled at him, made him strain, push himself to run faster, to get to her before it got any worse—

He followed her song to the deserted street behind the cathedral, to the filthy backdrop punctuated by crumbling faces, where he found her crouching at the feet of a strange man as the night poured down torrentially, with her white shirt plastered to her skin immodestly, and her skirt spread out over the street to hide her own hand that was underneath the garments, lost in the folds of fabric and to her own pleasure, while the other hand massaged the wet bulge in the man's pants.

_"Kyrie!"_

She stopped singing as he froze there and glanced over at him, her soft brown eyes drowned like flowers in the rain, and he could tell, even from a distance, that she barely recognized him. That she had only glanced his way to assess him as another potential source of pleasure, another body to ignite her own. She smiled a smile that had no business on the face of the girl he had grown up with, the one he had loved his whole life, then she turned her head and buried her face in the strange man's crotch, nuzzling him there and causing the man to reach out and grip her head by the hair.

_"Get away from her!"_

Without thinking, he had drawn his sword and streaked across the street like an avenging angel, prepared to do anything, _anything,_ to rescue the girl that meant everything to him.

"What the—_shit! Fuck!_" The man stumbled back and fell to the ground, tried to scramble away through the puddle that had formed in the gutter. But Nero was on him, sword to throat. His devil bringer had fallen out of the sling, and the glow from his demon arm cast an eerie blue tint on pale skin.

_"Don't you touch her! Don't you—"_

"She wanted it! _She_ came on to _me! _I didn't—I swear—"

_"Liar!"_

His hand trembled. The tip of the sword pierced skin, and as the blood trickled down, the man screamed. The piercing sound of it recalled Nero to himself in the midst of all the rage and despair, the injustice of it all. He couldn't just kill a man. He couldn't—

He dropped his sword arm to his side, stared at the ground while the rain poured out of the sky in sheets. The man at his feet moved tentatively backwards, and when his actions met no resistance, he scrambled up and took off running.

Nero slowly sheathed his sword and turned.

Kyrie remained where she had fallen, like a broken doll floating in a pool of dirty water. Nero went to her. He shrugged out of his coat and knelt down by her side, wrapping her in it. Gently, he scooped her up into his arms, and as her head lolled onto his shoulder, he couldn't help but compare the feel of it to the other times he had been able to hold her, save her, protect her.

_I trusted you to protect her…_

Credo.

_I'd do anything, be anything, to protect her—_

His own promise, destroyed, crumbling around him, like the city was crumbling_. What happened? I saved her._ _**I saved her...**_

Into the main chamber of the cathedral, and out through the side door, and up into the monastery where they had made a temporary home, now that the barracks were destroyed and the residential wing needed extensive repairs. They passed no one in the halls, for which Nero was grateful. Not that anyone was left to challenge his right to be out with Kyrie in the middle of the night. The majority of the Order had scattered to the four winds in the days after the destruction of the city, but it was easier not to have to deal with the unasked questions, the fear in eyes that lingered on his demon arm. The whispers behind his back that called him a monster, the one who had somehow precipitated their suffering, even if he had been the one to save them all in the end.

He reached the door to Kyrie's suite as she woke to her surroundings and became restless in his arms. Kicking the door open, he carried her into the room and fought to disentangle her arms from around his neck so he could place her on the couch, struggled to maintain his composure as she wantonly threw herself at him, trying to entice him into sexual play with any advance she could muster. Thirty minutes of this battle, of trying to get her unclothed and dried off, and settled in her bedroom without compromising her dignity any further, and Nero wanted to scream out his anger and frustration, cry out his bitter despair so that the whole world would know how terribly unfair it was that _Kyrie_ was the one to suffer, the one who was broken like the city had been broken. But he simply exited the apartment as the hot tears fell, and locked the door behind him. He sank to the floor in front of the door, swearing to himself in a voice that sounded like that of a dead brother to stay there the rest of the night, _and every night,_ until he could figure out a way to fix this.

In the morning, he would pay any price. In the morning, he would find a way. Kyrie was almost her old self again, in the mornings.

* * *

The laughter was familiar—_so familiar._ Cold. Superior. But it was only a backdrop, and not in any way as important as the hot press of skin, the shared breath, the lazy smirk on the kid's face because _this_ time Dante had let him—

"When did you know?"

A hand to hair. A fistful of moonlight, tugging, none-too-gently, tilting the head back and fully exposing a neck, so Dante could feast on it at leisure. His answer came muffled in skin. "The first time. In the cathedral. When you tried to take my head off with my own sword. You piqued my interest. I thought you were…spirited."

"Spirited."

Dante stopped his assault on the most perfect neck ever created and raised his head, looking down at his bedmate with a cocky grin. "Yeah, spirited. Like a colt. Just needing to be ridden hard and broken to saddle and bit." A sharp elbow to the ribs was the reaction to that statement, followed by a quick knee to the stomach that made him catch his breath, and, finally, a body shove that had him tumbling off the mattress and onto the floor in a heap. "Oh, _yeah," _he said, as he propped himself up on his arms and grinned maniacally at the younger man in his bed. Nero had his right hand clenched in a fist; the left was making a cocky gesture, challenging him to make with the reprisals, despite the fact that they were both as naked as the day they were born. Dante could feel his heart start to pound, his blood race as he crouched on the floor, ready to pounce.

"Hmm. So you wanna fight?" He leaped, his body impacting Nero's while arms grappled for control. They rolled across the bed, and off it and onto the floor in a tangle of blankets and a crash of furniture. They spent a good fifteen minutes wreaking havoc in a bedroom that hadn't quite recovered from their last late-night tussle. But it was only a room, and Dante didn't care about it, not like he cared about the way Nero bucked under him, wild and uncontrollable, the way their naked bodies seemed to lock together, filling all of the empty spaces, each with the other, like Ebony and Ivory settling into their holsters, Rebellion into its sheath. He didn't care about anything—_not the way he cared about Nero._

And throughout their battle, as he had to bring all of his strength and skill to bear to control the raging storm in his arms, Dante could only think that it could never get any better—never, _ever_ get any better than _**this.**_

"You were made for me, kid," he growled, as he pinned Nero's hands above his head and secured his sweat-slicked body to the floor with his own. _"I knew it the minute I laid eyes on you…"_

_You were made for me…_

Dante awoke with a gasp as his flailing body hit the wooden slats of the floor. He lay there for a moment, staring up at the ceiling and the shadows cast by the pale light through the window curtains. "Now that was just _scary,"_ he mumbled, as he replayed his most recent dream in his head, mentally shying away from some of the more sappy dream-deluded admissions. He closed his eyes, then opened them again and got to his feet with a sigh. Someone was fucking with him. This situation had progressed from annoying to downright aggravating.

After all, everyone in their right mind knew there was nothing he loved more than his _guns._

When he finally made it downstairs for the day, he found Trish waiting for him, which was convenient because he had a question he wanted to ask her anyway. She was sitting at his desk, with her feet in the air, flipping through one of the magazines that he hadn't had time yet to read. If it had been any other day he might have been annoyed, but today he had other things on his mind.

He made his way over to the jukebox. "I don't suppose making yourself at home included making breakfast."

Trish peered at him over the top of the book. "It's lunchtime."

"Then I don't suppose you made lunch."

She shrugged. "With what? When was the last time you went grocery shopping?"

Dante paused, considering. "I bought beer last week."

"I rest my case."

"You could have ordered something."

Trish's feet hit the floor with a thud of black heels impacting wood. "I'm not your mother. I just look like her."

Dante scowled, pressed a few keys on the jukebox, visibly relaxing when the pulse-pounding rhythm of his favorite song filled the air. He walked over to the desk, straddled a chair backwards, and cut to the chase.

"Fortuna City."

"What about it?"

"How's the kid coming along?"

"How would I know?" She paused, rolled her eyes, and then relented. "Better than you. At least he's keeping himself busy."

For some reason, Trish's response loosed the breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "I think the kid might need some help."

An eyebrow went up. "Been keeping tabs?"

Dante scoffed. "Of course not. Since when have I kept tabs on _anybody?"_

Trish shrugged. "Since you started giving arms away?"

"I haven't—"

"You let him keep _Yamato."_

"Yeah, well…" Dante ducked his head. "It seemed like a good idea at the time." He straightened. "I can get it back anytime I want."

Trish stared at her nails. "A priceless gift…with strings. Cute. If I didn't know better," she got to her feet, fished a wad of money out of her ample cleavage and threw it in his direction, "I'd say you were getting soft in your old age. That's your cut of the last job. Don't spend it all in one place."

His sometimes-partner sashayed across the room, heading for the door. "Nero has his hands full," she called out over a shoulder. "The Order has been gutted. Devils left and right, and the city is practically swimming in scavengers. I'm sure he could use some help if you were thinking about visiting—"

Dante shook his head. "Not my responsibility."

"All the same, you might want to consider it. It's a war zone over there, and he was struggling with his demon side _before_ all of this went down. Now he has Yamato." Her hand was on the door, ready to push it open. "You two might look like birds of a feather, but he's not nearly as strong as you…"

_tbc_


End file.
